Chase House

Between 1882 and World War I, the Chase House at Strawbery Banke was an orphanage. Two kids died of diphtheria inside.

A little girl runs down the second-floor hallway of the Chase House and disappears before anyone gets close. That sighting comes up in tour accounts and staff reports at Strawbery Banke Museum more than any other. Guests have heard her screaming from inside a locked room. Doors that closed at the end of the day turn up open in the morning, and the ceiling fans cycle on in rooms where nobody has touched the switch.

The Chase House is one of the grandest Georgian buildings in Portsmouth, built in 1762 for the merchant Stephen Chase. It is the first structure Strawbery Banke restored when the museum was founded in 1965, and today it is interpreted as an 1818 merchant's home, meticulously furnished, open to the public as part of the outdoor museum's ten-acre campus. What does not show up in the interpretation is the middle chapter of the building's life, which is the part that matters for the haunting.

From 1882 until World War I, the Chase House wasn't a home. It was an orphanage called the Chase Home for Children, serving Portsmouth kids who had lost their parents or been abandoned. Conditions in American orphanages in that era ranged from decent to grim, and the Chase Home had its share of tragedy. Two children died of diphtheria during its operation, a disease that killed kids in waves through nineteenth-century New England. That is the documented part. The undocumented part, passed down in Portsmouth ghost-tour circuits and repeated in haunted-places writeups, is that one young girl hanged herself in an upstairs room.

The hanging story has never been corroborated in the museum's research, and Strawbery Banke is careful not to market the building as haunted. The sightings pile up anyway, most of them tied to the girl. Guests describe her in the hallway, thin, pale, in a plain dress, running away. When the closers lock up the house at the end of the day, a child's voice comes from rooms they have just cleared. The screams from behind the locked bedroom door show up most often in after-hours tour accounts.

The other reports are quieter. Doors left shut turn up open the next morning. Lights and ceiling fans cycle on their own, which the maintenance crews have blamed on old wiring more than once, and which keep happening anyway. One visitor on the staircase felt a child's hand brush hers with nobody visible beside her.

Portsmouth has a lot of competition when it comes to haunted real estate. The city is old, and the waterfront is full of Georgian and Federal houses with stories. Chase House gets picked out from the pack because the haunting keeps pointing at the same thing. A specific age. A specific floor. A specific sound. Whether or not a girl died here by her own hand, at least two children did under the roof during the diphtheria years, and orphanage records show many more passed through in conditions that left scars.

The museum leans toward the 1818 merchant household in its tours. The girl in the hallway keeps leaning toward the orphanage.